Firestorm d-6

by Taylor Anderson

  “You okayshe asked.

  “Swell.”

  A little hesitantly, she hugged him with one arm. The healing wound in her side was still stiff and painful. “You not look swell.”

  “I’m fine. You?”

  “I was in comm shack, safe enough. Mr. Paalmer kept us all there. No weapons.” She shook her head, and her eyes blinked loathing. “Them things sure look like flying Grik!”

  “Yeah.”

  “We fly with them things?” Her tail twitched nervously.

  “Maybe. We need to look the plane over.”

  “I hope it’s busted.”

  Fred snorted and looked at her. “Me too.”

  It wasn’t, at least not too badly. They discovered that, in addition to rocks, some of the “dragon birds” had been carrying and throwing cannonballs! This was further proof they were in league, in some way at least, with the Doms. A big volcanic rock had exploded on impact with the deck and sent some easily patched shards into the fuselage of the “Nancy,” and a cannonball had punched a hole in the starboard wing, just forward of the aileron. Jeek said the hole would take a couple days to fix because it had damaged a stringer and the glue to fix it would take that long to dry-longer if it rained. Kari was clearly disappointed the plane wasn’t wrecked beyond repair.

  The rest of the ship hadn’t suffered too badly. The heavy roundshot had dented the deck like giant hailstones but caused little damage otherwise. A ’Cat had been killed by one, and another had landed on Earl Lanier’s foot, smashing two of his toes. He was hobbling around now, tormenting a single crutch far beyond its capacity and bellowing for somebody to get the “damn, stinking things” cleared away from around the galley “if anybody ever wants to eat again.” Fred saw Tabby come on deck, look around, and seeing Spanky, rush to him and leap at him, enfolding him in a crushing embrace. Awful lot of hugging on this ship today, he mused, feeling a little uncomfortable. He wasn’t the traditionalist some were-like Spanky. Fred was young enough that tradition hadn’t yet seeped into his bones. But even he knew hugging just wasn’t right on a destroyer. Spanky obviously agreed, because he glanced around self-consciously while he peeled Tabby off. Everyone knew he considered her like a daughter, but proprieties must be maintained. Spanky didn’t scold the scarred Lemurian engineering officer, though; he just stood there, listening to her report on the leakage in the steering engine room, which Fred overheard was under control.

  It wasn’t all rosy. Six ’Cats were killed in the aerial attack, and three were “missing,” including the lookout who’d been in the crow’s nest. Doubtless, the “missing” were dead too. Nobody even saw what happened to the lookout. A few men and ’Cats had been wounded, but unless they’d been poisoned or got infected with something the polta paste couldn’t handle, they’d be fine. The light nature of the injuries was confirmed when Fred saw Courtney Bradford on deck, apparently content to let his pharmacist’s mate deal with the “scratches” while he defended a relatively undamaged specimen of the new enemy from Bashear’s detail. Eventually, Captain Reddy himself came in response to Courtney’s shrill cries of outrage and interceded on his behalf, saying, “Cut it up; learn what you can. I particularly want to know what it eats, and your opinion of its intelligence. But get it over the side before dark. Their guts can’t be much different from Grik, and you’ve played with those pl, ap of times.”

  Courtney set to work, and Fred and Kari moved aft.

  “We fly with those things, what we do?” Kari asked.

  Fred shrugged. “We’re faster, I think. We need to have a weapon, though-besides a pistol. Let’s find Campeti or Stites and see what they have to say.”

  The storm in the west either dissipated or moved away, because the threatening clouds gave way to glittering stars when the sun finally sank into the sea. Walker churned north through increasingly quartering swells that maintained her sickening, corkscrewing motion, but she was no longer taking such heavy seas over the bow. The mood in the pilothouse was glum. Everyone knew they’d been on the verge of a momentous victory; one that might’ve even finished “this” war, at least for the time being, and allowed them to go “home” and get on with what many considered their “bigger business.” To be deprived of that victory and chased away by animals-and very Grik-like animals at that-left some a little confused, thoughtful, and reevaluating their priorities. Most of Walker ’s crew had fought in the Naval Battle of Scapa Flow, and it had been a bitter contest. Only a few had been ashore to see just how much like the Grik the troops of the Dominion behaved. Now a majority was beginning to realize that, regardless how different in some ways, this was the same war they’d already been fighting: a war against monsters bent on the destruction of people. That’s what it came down to, in the end.

  “What’ve you got, Courtney?” Matt asked when Bradford stumped up the stairs from aft. His clothes were bloody, but his hands were clean. Jenks was behind him, walking carefully. His wounds had been treated and he’d be fine, but the curative paste of the Lemurians had a slightly intoxicating effect.

  “You were right,” Bradford said. “Very Grik-like in most respects. The same, if even lighter hollow bones. A similar, though more colorful, downy covering. The wing structure is the greatest difference, but even the bones that support it look like radically elongated arm and finger bones! Of course, the musculature of the torso is different and more robust. I’m vaguely reminded of a pigeon.” He shook his head. “The proliferation and adaptation of the basic form is quite astonishing! First we had the various ‘races’ of Grik. Then Mr. Chapelle’s and Mr. Mallory’s expedition to recover Santa Catalina and her cargo revealed an amphibious species… Now we have one that flies!”

  “You once said it yourself, Courtney,” Matt reminded him. “On this world, Grik, or creatures like them, have risen to the top of the evolutionary heap.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Bradford agreed with a frown. “Not only are they the most dominant life-form we’ve come across, they’re even more physically adaptable to their various environments than we ever suspected.” He glanced apologetically at the ’Cats in the pilothouse. “ Physically adaptable,” he repeated. “Like us meager humans, our Lemurian friends have had to, and been able to rely on mental adaptability to survive. Hand to hand, no human or Lemurian is a match for any of the… hmm… perhaps semireptilian?” He scratched his balding head.

  “Courtney.”

  “Excuse me, indeed. As I’ve long maintained, we’re no match for them physically, but we appear to have an advantage when it comes to our capacity for imagination. The enemy in the west has developed a competitive technology only with the aid of humans, past and present. Here, these ‘lying Grik,’ these ‘dragons,’ are the tools of our human enemy. They’re a disconcerting weapon, but that’s all they are. Our enemy here remains the humans that control them.”

  “Okay,” agreed Matt, “so how does that work?”

  Courtney nodded at Jenks. “The dragons have a similar brain capacity to other Grik. Perhaps slightly less, but not significantly. Still, greater than we’ve ever seen them demonstrate-with the exception of our own dear Lawrence and the rest of his people, no doubt. This is likely due to cultural imperatives and… well, their very physical perfection. Their lethality as predators has perhaps subdued requirements for imaginative thought. In other words, they’re so good at what they do, they don’t need to think about ways to improve!”

  “Well… what makes Lawrence different?”

  “I can only presume, as an island race, his people have had to imagine more efficient methods of survival than chasing prey and eating it. Their resources were limited, and they had to imagine and learn skills such as boatbuilding, fishing, even agriculture. The same may even be true of the ‘jungle’ Grik Mr. Silva discovered. It’s possible Lawrence’s people might have ultimately evolved along lines similar to those in the swamps of Chill-Chaap and become famous swimmers, but I believe they’d already crossed the figurative ‘Rubicon.’ ”

/>   “That’s amazing,” Matt said, truly impressed, “but that still leaves us with how do the Doms control their lizard birds?”

  Courtney frowned, and his eyes suddenly reflected a horrible sight. “There’s some training involved, certainly, but upon opening the specimen, I discovered… human remains.” He stared hard at Matt, then at Jenks. “They feed them people.”

  There were gasps in the pilothouse. Courtney Bradford tried at times, but he really didn’t know how to whisper. Invariably, his various dissertations were overheard and spread throughout the ship. It didn’t really matter. Matt wanted his crew as well-informed as possible. “Scuttlebutt” often distorted things and made them worse. In this case, uninformed speculation would’ve probably sugarcoated the truth.

  “It’s known that the ‘un-Holy’ Dominion engages in blood sacrifice at the drop of a hat,” Courtney continued, “as part of their ‘native’-inspired perversion of the already rather… insistent.. . early-eighteenth-century version of the Catholic faith they brought to this world, but using people to feed those monsters…!”

  “Makes perfect sense from their evil perspective,” Jenks spit, his words slightly slurred. “Feed them the infirm, the sick, the wounded. .. perhaps the laborers they brought with them. Regardless, only able bellies are filled, and the priests probably manufacture ‘divine’ justifications!” He looked at Matt. “Do you think they’ll be kinder to conquered peoples?”

  “Relax, Harvey,” Matt said. “We’ll stop them somehow. We would have already, if not for their pets.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, we have to assume they know that too. We can’t count on their being idiots. What’ll they do now that we’ve learned about their ‘secret weapon,’ but they know about Walker?”

  CHAPTER 13

  Kaufman Field Baalkpan

  “T en- Hut!” cried a shrill, Lemuran voice. The sound didn’t echo in the hangar made of canvas and the oversize Baalkpan bamboo, but at least the building was tight enough to make it loud.

  “Oh, ah, ‘as you were,’ by all means,” replied Adar’s voice in his carefully cultivated English.

  “Thanks, Your Excellency,” Colonel Ben Mallory replied, and his voice did echo-from within the wheel-well he’d somehow managed to cram an unlikely percentage of himself into. “Just a minute… and I oughta… Eeee! There! Now, if I can just get me outta here!” A pair of wrenches dropped to the hard-packed, concretelike crushed limestone floor, and Ben grunted and squirmed until he extricated himself. “Ahh,” he said, wincing, as he stepped forward and straightened from his crouch. “Gimme a rag, Soupy,” he demanded, his eyes clenched shut over hydraulic fluid and burning sweat. He held his greasy hands out, blindly.

  Lieutenant (jg) Suaak-Pas-Ra, acting exec of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron, was similarly buried in the cockpit of the P-40E, with only his legs and tail visible. “Can’t, sur,” came the muffled reply, but somebody hit Ben in the chest with a clean cloth, and he wiped his face. He blinked.

  “Wow,” he said when he could see. “What brings the whole back row of the chessboard to my modest little abode?” Not only was Adar standing in the wide opening of the hangar, but quite a few others including Steve Riggs, Perry Brister, “Ronson” Rodriguez, and Bernie Sandison were with him. Those he understood. He was surprised to see Isak Rueben and several “high-up” Lemurians he recognized, but didn’t really know, however. He didn’t understand why Pam Cross and Sister Audry were there at all. Wait, Pam’s a nurse. She’s probably here to check the new arrivals, and make sure the men they sent out to me are really fit to be here.

  Adar walked slowly around the big, muscular-looking plane that seemed to crouch menacingly in the still, sultry shade of the big building. As always, he wore what all the humans referred to as his “Sky Priest suit,” despite his lofty status, but the star-spangled, purple hood was thrown back, revealing his gray fur and bright, silver eyes. He’d been there when Santa Catalina limped into Baalkpan Bay, and he’d watched the heavy crates removed from the dry-docked ship. He’d even been out to the infant airfield while it was still under construction and the fighters were being uncrated and positioned for assembly. But this was the first time he’d ever seen one of the “hot ships” in one piece. Even though he had no real grasp of what it was capable of, beyond what he’d been told, he could tell just by looking at it; by the sleek, animalistic, hungry lines, that it certainly appeared capable of more than he’d ever truly believed.

  “It is magnificent!” he gushed. “Oh, it is!” He took a breath. “And how many have you managed to save, to assemble?”

  “We have twenty, Mr. Chairman, that’ll fly once we finish getting everything hooked up,” Ben said as though he’d failed his task. “Plus one more we can fly with the landing gear fixed.” He shrugged. “I mean to use that one as a trainer, if Bernie doesn’t swipe it and stick those Jap floats salvaged out of Amagi ’s hangar on it. Nuttiest thing I ever heard! A P-40 seaplane!” There were chuckles, and he looked wistfully at the fighter. “We might even cobble one more together, but no promises. It’s not so much a matter of spare parts; we’re actually pretty good there. As I said, we have engines, radiators, gauges, tires… you name it. But some of the airframes were damaged in fundamental ways we didn’t expect just by looking at thm. The crates must’ve taken a real beating, particularly those in the holds, and the crate bracings themselves actually torqued things around.” He smirked. “The good news is, we’ll have plenty of replacement tail assemblies, windscreens, control surfaces, and,” he grunted, “rudder pedals. We’re also using two pretty corroded fuselage assemblies for simulated flight trainers. Got ’em rigged in the trees to respond to stick controls!”

  He looked at Riggs, then Ronson. “That was one little thing I was going to see if your guys could do: juice the instruments so we can do some night-flying training-without using one of our batteries… or busting a plane!”

  Ronson grinned. “Sure thing, Ben.” He looked at Riggs. “It’ll be good training for the EM flight engineers, and you can use batteries! Homegrown ones! I don’t know when we’ll have anything like Bakelite, but we’re doing good stuff with glass and ceramic, and we finally have batteries that don’t weigh a ton.”

  Bernie looked at Ronson. “Just so long as you don’t give us any more of those wood and brass ‘box bombs’!”

  Ronson cringed and cut his eyes back at Riggs. “So? I forgot there was zinc in brass! I’m an electrician’s mate, not a metallurgist! Nobody got hurt!”

  Ben laughed. “That’d be swell, so long as I don’t have to use any of my batteries for the job!”

  “So,” Pam Cross suddenly asked in her heavy Brooklyn accent, “when’re ya gonna fly one?”

  “Well, it’s been taking a while to get all the bugs ironed out,” Ben defended, a little self-consciously. “I got almost two hundred ’Cats workin’ on these crates and trying to learn how to fly ’em-without letting anybody fly one! Only guys with flight experience are even allowed into the training program, but”-he took a breath-“nobody but me, Lieutenant Mackey, and those five other poor fellas that came in the other day on the ‘Buzzard’ have any experience at all in P-40s, and honestly, a couple of them have no business flying anything for a long time. The guys are wrecks, and not just physically. Karen says they shouldn’t ever fly again! Those damn Japs

  …” He stopped. “Doesn’t matter, anyway, I have to let the guys here have an equal shot, after all the work they’ve done.”

  “What about the ground crews?” Sister Audry asked. “Some enlisted men have also arrived from Maa-ni-la, yes?”

  Pete was just as surprised to hear her speak as he’d been when Pam had.

  “Yeah, they’re doing okay, I guess. Sergeant Dixon, the one who showed up with Mackey, is a lot better now, and he’s pretty much become the senior crew chief around here. He makes the new guys take it easy. Dixon’s a gem. I don’t know if we could’ve done it without him. All the planes came with instructions and I’d seen them put together before, but
he’d actually done it.”

  “Where is he now?” Adar asked.

  “Couple hangars over, doing the same as me and Soupy and these other guys.” He patted the Curtiss green wing behind him. “About a thousand little ‘final touches.’ All the planes are together that are going to be, and thanks to the Corps of Engineer-’Cats Brister loaned me, we’ve got roofs over every one. But we’ve still got to finish checking out the hydraulic systems, which we were just doing here, and make sure all the connections are tight on the Prestone tanks, fill ’em up-and do the same for the oil tanks and Prestone and oil radiators, rec thhe batteries, gauges, triple -check the connections on all three fuel tanks.” He wiped his brow with his rag and grinned at Pam Cross. Gosh, she really is pretty, looking at me like that! he thought. Too bad she’s so stuck on that maniac Silva… or is she? He blinked and looked at the others. “After that, we’ll finally put the props on and do a preliminary run-up on the engines-we just got fuel a couple days ago.” He stopped and looked at Isak Rueben. He knew the scruffy little guy was nuts; all the “Mice” were. He’d never forget watching them chain-smoke cigarettes, covered with oil from head to foot…

  “That reminds me. We have a problem with condensation in the fuel tanks. Too much humidity and heat, I guess.”

  Isak realized Ben was talking to him. “Uh, just hafta keep them tanks empty-er maybe plumb, brimmin’ full, is all. Nothin’ else for it. Drain off the damn water before you fill ’em… sir.”

  “Then you gonna fly?” Pam pressed.

  “No. After we run up the engines, we’ll double-check everything again, retighten any bolts we missed, or might’ve wiggled loose, and then we’ll slow-time the engines…”